… “I would not put the cart before the horse and define [Romney] as an unambiguous frontrunner,” DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told TPM in an interview at St. Anselm College in Manchester. “He’s coming off what at some point probably won’t even be defined as a win in Iowa where fewer voters came out for him than came out in 2008.” She added that anything less than 50% in New Hampshire should be interpreted as a sign of weakness given his close ties to the state.
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Nonetheless, as polls show Romney threatening to secure the nomination early, Democrats are unveiling new campaigns to try to define his business experience as more Gorden Gekko than Steve Jobs. Party officials have been holding press events in Iowa and New Hampshire with Randy Johnson, a worker who was laid off from his job at American Pad and Paper under Bain Capital’s management in the 1990s, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that Bain’s layoffs under Mitt Romney will be a critical part of their general election strategy should he win the nomination. Romney says that his opponents are cherry-picking his failures and ignoring success stories like Staples, but his campaign has been unable to substantiate its claims that he created net jobs and critics note that even some of Bain’s failures ended up creating a profit for Romney and his fellow investors through consulting fees and dividends.
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“Mitt Romney, I think, is more of a job cremator than a job creator,” Schultz said. She added: “He was a corporate buyout specialist at Bain Capital. He dismantled companies. He cut jobs. He forced companies into bankruptcy and he outsourced jobs and sent jobs overseas. That’s not a record to write home about, that’s not a record to be proud of, and it’s something voters need to know.”

I have no way of knowing whether she does it for a living or not, but if I were a candidate for anything, I’d want to hire B-J poster extraordinaire Jennifer for all my political ads. Take this excerpt from one post of hers I saved from July 24, 2010 (and imagine this message superimposed over a bunch of cigar-smoking fat cats with trophy wives flitting about in a rich setting):

Voiceover –

“There’s a lot of money being thrown around by wealthy interests in this election, through shadowy third-party groups funded by oil tycoons and the richest 1% of Americans. Most of these ads are attacking members of the current government, because it is asking those for whom the American dream has paid off most handsomely to pull their own weight and even give a little back to the country and working people who have made their wealth possible.”

”But they don’t want to be responsible for paying off any of the deficits we’ve run up to give them big tax breaks – they want you to do that. That’s why some of them are spending millions to put the Republican party back in power – because the government is about the only thing they don’t already own right now.”

”They know where their financial interest lies.”

Do you?”

This is just one example. When it comes to messaging, Jennifer is one of those posters I pay attention to.

Mitt Romney is pressing the delete button on his own record, in the same way that he pressed the delete button on the jobs of hard-working Americans when he destroyed their companies so he could build himself another mansion. Is Mitt Romney a man you want to trust with the delete button at three o’clock in the morning?

@MikeJ: I don’t believe in buying the framing of the opposition. I prefer phrases related to the Gekko era, like corporate takeovers, chainsaw Sam, stripping (pillaging?) the company, stealing the assets. Or just “Romney made his money by bankrupting companies.”

On a related note, I can’t remember any of the media saying that all the companies Romney is credited with creating jobs (Staples, Dominoes, Sports Authority) are in low wage service sector and the companies that many of the companies he bankrupted were relatively high paying manufacturing jobs.

So many reasons to hate Mitt Romney. The only people who really seem to like him are the clones whose last name is also Romney.

His record sucks and he isn’t charismatic. He’s really lucky there has been so much attention elsewhere, cuz when it fully lands on him if he wins the nomination, he’s going to make John Kerry look like John Travolta.

@Ira-NY: Yeah, backed by Sheldon Adelson and his money. And Adelson is the type who uses $100 bills to light his cigars, if he smokes them. So this is going to get interesting. I guess Newt really meant it when he said he’s gonna get medieval on Romney’s ass.

Mitt Romney isn’t a Soc.ialist, just a sociopath. Mitt Romney’s Great Leap Forward was fuelled by a 10 million dollar bailout for his failed start-up company – Bain. Mitt Romney made 250 million dollars destroying parts of the American economy – but he’ll never admit that his big bucks were all because of a big government intervention by his Washington cronies. Mitt Romney cost taxpayers millions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs. Just think what he could do for us when he gets his hands on a trillion dollar bail-out budget. Mitt Romney loves to gamble with your money. The question is: do you feel lucky?

@Katie5: I really like the “Citizen of the Cayman Islands” angle, and think that could have some real net legs, but in the meantime am perfectly okay with “Job Cremator,” as well as “the guy who laid off your dad” and “dickbag with a crease in his jeans and, likely, his magic undies.” In other words, I’m good with leveling any and all insults so that, as we saw with Sister Sarah, aka Caribou Barbie and Bible Spice, Mittens is reduced in the public eye to a cartoonish character unfit for the Presidnetsy.

Sorry, I’m at work in my studio (ex-garage) and I’ll have to check all this in the A.M.– but did anyone note the Nickky Kristoff thing in the NYT saying “Don’t worry, Mitty’s really a sane kompashinett moderate, let’s just ignore the right-wing nutjobbery, kuz he really doesn’t mean it.” I’m having a flashback to Joe Klein’s piece about W. in ’98 or so– one of those bad trip things.
Sorry if I missed anyone’s earlier comment about this– working late and just wanted to check in with y’all. Great thread, great comments. Catch the rest of the thread after 4am.

It wasn’t until 1978 that the Mormon church decided to allow blacks to fully participate in church rites. Mitt Romney was 31 years old at the time, which means that he had spent nearly half of his life in an organization that excluded blacks from full participation.

By all means continue to ask Ron Paul about his newsletters. By all means continue to ask Rick Perry about his hunting camp. By all means hold Newt Gingrich and Rick Sanntorum accountable for their repeated dog whistles. But if we are going to hold these candidates to a certain level of standards, shouldn’t Romney also be held to those same standards?

Little Debbie has been very successful at getting Republicans elected in South Florida. Ileana and the despicable Brothers, all 3 owe their fealty to the bullshit Little Debbie spun to help the GOP maintain control of South Florida while Sparkly Pony Princess ran the DCCC.

@some guy: Hmm… ‘troll’, or ‘Skunk Ape?’ If you know enough to know who Illy and her bro’s are, you ought to know how long they’ve been around, which is way, way before Deb. She ‘helped the GOP maintain control’ by being a noisy Dem bitch, I suppose.
F’kin carpet/firebagger. Hard enough to be a Dem down here without ‘friends’ like you.
Sorry, got no ‘Skunk Ape’ food. Ignore him, please.

Hey folks, here’s the story of Mittie the Moocher
He’d buy your factory, strip it bare, then he’d boot ya
Sell the company overseas for all he could make
now he’ll do it to the country – so vote no, for Pete’s sake!

@some guy: Hmm… ‘troll’, or ‘Skunk Ape?’ If you know enough to know who Illy and her bro’s are, you ought to know how long they’ve been around, which is way, way before Deb. She ‘helped the GOP maintain control’ by being a noisy Dem bitch, I suppose.
F’kin carpet/firebagger. Hard enough to be a Dem down here without ‘friends’ like you.
Sorry, got no ‘Skunk Ape’ food. Ignore him, please.

It’s probably been noted here before, but I just heard a couple of sound bites from Romney from the debates, to the effect that he knew what it was like to be worried that he wasn’t going to be able to make his payroll and that there had been a couple of times that he was afraid he was going to get a pink slip (“Please, Daddy, I won’t do it again.”).

We finally know why three important income tax treaties (a new treaty with Hungary and protocols to existing treaties with Switzerland and Luxembourg) haven’t gotten floor votes in the Senate, after being favorably reported out of the Foreign Relations Committee months ago.

Rand Paul put a secret hold on them. Seems he is philosophically opposed to the very idea of the IRS sharing information with tax authorities in other countries, even though (or perhaps because) information exchange is critical to combating cross-border tax scams.

There are other reasons why tax treaties are important, but this one is sufficient for me to want to shove an electric cattle prod up Paul’s … nose.

Gunning, McConnell, and now Paul. How does Kentucky keep coming up with these people?

I like ‘cremator’ because it doesn’t sound like some swashbuckling wicked destroyer- it sounds like a mortician, and Romney looks and talks and acts like a mortician, so it’s perfect. Job cremator it is.

Don’t forget that ‘devastating savage job destroyer’ sounds good to a lot of silly people who vote on the basis of manliness. Don’t do ANY of the Republican’s work for them as far as making messaging about Mitt being the tough conqueror of anything much.

He’s the faceless cog that got you fired, not ‘corporate raider’, he’s the smiling creepy mortician, the job cremator. There’s nothing macho about him. Dubya, much less the scary Cheney, far out-machos Mitt.

Neither possible nor wise. The same laws that protect your 1040s from public disclosure (Internal Revenue Code Section 6103 and Section 552(b)(3) of the Freedom of Information Act) protects Romney’s. You can and should continue to press him to release them, and if he chooses not to you can and should beat on him about it, but if he chooses not to you are SOL.

@Stan of the Sawgrass:
Its a dim memory now but I do remember something about her endorsing a Republican candidate for Congress against a Dem sometime in the early 00s. Anger at that would hardly be firebagger territory.

I have seen her on the talking heads & she ran hot and cold as far as I could tell. But those are just impressions, I don’t know much about her record.

@Kane:
I seem to recall that the reason the ban was lifted was because of some weirdness about the LDS head prophet (or whatever the head of the LDS church is called) at the time claiming to have been told by God to do so. Of course, it couldn’t have been due to all the bad publicity the church was getting about its backwards policy against blacks, specifically black men, from fully participating in the church. No, not all.

I don’t think either Job Cremator or Vulture Capitalist is going to win over the unengaged or uninformed voters, like my sister, who seem to be the tie breakers in these elections.

I am pretty sure she would hear Job Cremator as Job Creator, and she wouldn’t know what a venture capitalist is, so she wouldn’t get the play on words. She’s a smart person, she just pays no attention to politics or world news. Her take is that she can’t do anything about all of it, so she just focuses on her day to day life.

These are the people we need to get through to, and clever phrases aren’t going to do it.

I’m guessing you mean Jim Bunning, unless Kentucky came up with another douchebag while I wasn’t looking. The rest of your comment infuriates me, but it’s not surprising. Rand Paul would LOVE to eliminate the IRS I bet.

Personally, I think the Democrats would benefit from a succinct way of educating the populace about what exactly private equity and venture cap are and how they work. Because I think at heart, not many people are going to buy the current thrust, which is “Romney and his cronies went into companies with the express purpose of firing lots of people and collecting gov’t bailouts.” You have to get people believing he’s out and out evil for that, but I think most folks will think “c’mon, Monty Burns and Gordon Gekko wouldn’t get a major party nomination for POTUS.”

In reality, Bain doesn’t benefit that much when a business they buy goes south – the idea is to buy at what they think is a discount based on their idea of unexploited opportunity available to a business, inject capital by leveraging it, insert their own management, skinny up cost and boost the bottom line, then sell a nicely humming little business. That’s the best way to ensure return for their investors and ensure they invest in the next fund.

The line to push, IMHO, is this:

Mitt Romney made his millions gambling with other peoples’ money, businesses and jobs. And when things went badly, who’s the only one who didn’t lose? Mitt Romney. In the blackjack game of business, Bain Capital is the house.

Republicans like to talk about how pro-capitalism they are. Is Mitt Romney what capitalism is supposed to be? Being President means making real decisions, with real risk, for real people like you. Do you want someone who’s never faced the consequences of his own poor decisions making them for you?

Play that at the end of a condensed version of the collapsed steel company story, right after tallying up the fees Romney and his guys made, and noting their 15% tax rate.

“Release the tax records”
Neither possible nor wise. The same laws that protect your 1040s from public disclosure (Internal Revenue Code Section 6103 and Section 552(b)(3) of the Freedom of Information Act) protects Romney’s. You can and should continue to press him to release them, and if he chooses not to you can and should beat on him about it, but if he chooses not to you are SOL.

I’m not sure that the Dems are in any way SOL if he doesn’t release them. If he doesn’t, he just reinforces the idea that he’s hiding something since every candidate since Watergate has voluntarily done so. If he does then the public will undoubtedly see that he’s paying a lower rate than the average citizen. Either way it’s a win for the Dems.

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